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"What happens when you fund conversations about changing the world for the better? The answer is: You don't know—that’s exactly why you do it."

—Elizabeth Good Christopherson

President and CEO of Rita Allen Foundation

What’s often forgotten in discussions of social investments, and measurements of their success, is that the first step in innovation is a step into the unknown. It requires curiosity and courage, leaps of faith for both the innovators and those who support them. When you trace the development of big new ideas, you often find that those first steps weren't taken in isolation—they arose from the simple act of people talking and imagining potential solutions together.

Elizabeth Good Christopherson

At the Rita Allen Foundation, we make it our mission to support transformative ideas in their earliest stages. Since 1976, the foundation has supported promising biomedical scholars at critical moments at the beginning of their careers—when the outcomes are least predictable. The Rita Allen Foundation Scholars program encourages innovation by young scientists who can’t be certain ahead of time what advances they’ll make. Scholars receive support for up to five years—long enough to establish a lab and several lines of research—and they come together periodically to share their work, a critical opportunity for getting input and new ideas from peers. Otherwise, they are free to pursue their curiosity and the evidence where they think best.

These investments have paid off many times over for all of us. Our scholars have identified genes that malfunction in cancer. They are tracing the neural pathways of pain. The are engineering fluorescent proteins to detect biochemical activity. They have gone on to win a Nobel Prize, a National Medal of Science, the Wolf Prize, and most recently two of the new $3 million Breakthrough Prizes in Life Sciences.

What does this have to do with social change?

Four years ago, our areas of investment expanded beyond biomedicine to support young leaders addressing issues like civic literacy and engagement and community building. As we considered how we could contribute best in these complex areas, we arrived at guiding principles based on a spirit of investigation, risk, rigor, collaboration, and freedom that we had learned to value from years of working with emerging biomedical scientists. What we’re creating, in a sense, is a lab for social change.

What is the key to developing any successful lab?

On the ground, it means seeking out and supporting some of the most innovative ideas and people to develop a new kind of impact, an impact whose form may change very quickly as conditions change around them. It means boosting up those trying the never-before-tried, providing resources to measure the results, and encouraging constant learning from failure as much as from success.

Since we’re interested in the very earliest stages of transformative ideas, it also means supporting open-ended conversations among diverse people with different ideas for solving significant problems.

You can’t be certain where such conversations will take critical thinkers. What you do know is that conversations spark collaboration, understanding, support, and inspiration. Hence the seminars and conferences that abound in the scientific world. Hence teatime at the Institute for Advanced Study down the road from us in Princeton, credited for the birth of countless collaborations and papers since it began in the 1930s. Teatime at the Institute happens in the “Common Room.” It’s a good name for it—it is, after all, an academic relative of the village common.

Conversations, I suspect, have been the beginning of most transformative new ideas. Take, for example, PeaceTXT, one of the enterprises the Rita Allen Foundation supports. PeaceTXT’s pilot program is on the ground in Kenya now using strategic text messages to interrupt election-related violence. Participating in the original conversation were a program that uses public health strategies to reduce urban violence (Cure Violence), a group of young people creating health care tools for mobile devices (Medic Mobile), and organizations using crisis mapping and SMS messaging to promote peace and facilitate humanitarian relief (Ushahidi and Sisi ni Amani). The conversation was made possible by PopTech, an organization supported by the Rita Allen Foundation, which became the nexus of this new collaborative project. Someday PeaceTXT hopes to disrupt street violence in the United States as well.

Another example of an investment in conversations that’s paying off? The Rita Allen Foundation supports Ashoka’s efforts to spark rich discussions about where innovation comes from, and how social entrepreneurs are building success in an ever-changing world.

The remarkable thing about online media is that conversations can bring in so many people. It’s easier to get feedback and to spread lessons from your work than ever before.

So why is it so hard for most nonprofits to get funding for communications? We hear from the organizations we support that communications is one of the areas in which they feel most stretched.

Expenses for communications, like those for leadership development, impact measurement, and other core elements of organizational capacity, are often overlooked by funders as “administrative” or “overhead”—extra weight around the real work of direct services or new projects.

It can also be difficult to measure the value of communication. What’s the cost of a missed opportunity for collaboration? What’s the expense of a new idea that wasn't thought of? There are good techniques for evaluating communications efforts, but it’s never going to be as straightforward as measuring, say, the effectiveness of a vaccine.

That can’t stop us. More than ever, communication is about being part of a conversation—with constituents, with peers, with decision-makers across subjects and continents, and with the public at large. It can result in big improvements and small ones. It can coordinate related efforts, and it can provide a sense of mutual support and community.

Appreciating communication requires a shift in focus to encompass not just the known and predictable, but the unknown as well. When we value curiosity and collaboration, when we value risk and innovation, when we value the solutions of the future, communication will be one of philanthropy’s first priorities instead of one of its last.

This post was written by Elizabeth Good Christopherson, the president and CEO of the Rita Allen Foundation, in anticipation of the 2013 Ashoka Future Forum on May 30-31 in Washington, D.C.

The 2013 Ashoka Future Forum will bring together 400 of the foremost social innovators, business entrepreneurs, philanthropists and media to share their biggest problems and celebrate their most thought-provoking solutions. Keep up with the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #FutureForum.